Surviving Progress

The name of this documentary is "Surviving Progress," but that's only because "The Sky Is Falling and We're All Gonna Die" wouldn't fit on a marquee. Based on author Ronald Wright's "A Short History of Progress," the film explains that everything is going to hell on every possible front and that the chances of survival are slim.

Sure, there's some fake uplift near the finish, because you can't send audiences out ready to kill themselves. So we get some halfhearted blather about humanity ultimately coming together because humans beings are problem solvers, etc. But really the headline coming out of this movie is that it's all over but the screaming. Thus, as a viewer you have three choices: Prepare for doom, deny the movie's conclusions or avoid this documentary. "Surviving Progress" is about as upbeat as a Paul Krugman column.

Wright, whose work inspired the film, appears in interviews, describing what he calls a "progress trap." He points out that the prehistoric men who learned to kill two mammoths instead of one made genuine progress that supported their own survival. But the prehistoric men who learned how to chase 200 mammoths off a cliff and kill them all were caught in a progress trap. They wiped out the mammoth and, thereby, destroyed their own way of life.

The movie goes on to describe the financial and environmental progress traps that humanity now finds itself in. The filmmakers postulate that the financial system will ultimately collapse altogether, and the only real question is whether this will happen before or after deforestation, overpopulation and over-consumption has made the globe into an uninhabitable hell. Or, as Wright helpfully puts it, "We have to confront the possibility that the entire experience of civilization is in itself a progress trap." That's the tipping point, after which the movie descends into nihilism.

Comparisons to the Roman Empire abound. This is common in times of cultural, economic and spiritual doubt. Documentaries about the end of the world and the end of civilization abounded in the '60s and '70s too, because people felt on the edge of things back then, and maybe something like that phenomenon is what we're seeing here. In other words, maybe the people in this movie really don't know what they're talking about. In any case, believing them gets you nowhere, because they offer nothing.